Let’s Tell This Story Properly
by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
(Transit Books, April 2019)
Reviewed by Noah M. Mintz
Who is labeled a migrant? Who gets to be an expatriate? Even as names like Hemingway and Fitzgerald might be the first to come to mind, the expat canon includes Baldwin and Hughes, Richard Wright and Aimé Césaire. The commonality among any of these writers is both a sense of place, and of being out of place, negotiating the balance between homeland and chosen home. The labels of “migrant” and “immigrant” have always been politically charged, but especially so in these times of immense, widespread displacement. “I know we would usually say migrant stories,” the Kampala-born author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi recently said in an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “but I’m moving away from that and using the term expat experiences, because I’ve noticed that when the British are talking about their immigrants in Europe who are now being affected by Brexit, they don’t talk about them as immigrants, they call them expats.” Her stance is not rooted in theory: speaking from her home in Manchester, as one of over 50,000 Ugandan nationals now residing in the United Kingdom, her choice of words is significant. And they underpin her latest book, Let’s Tell This Story Properly, a collection of stories reflecting the experiences of her compatriots both in Manchester and in Uganda. It would be tempting to add it to the growing canon of recent “migrant fiction” that has arisen in the wake of a global migration crisis. It is certainly, on the face of it and in its heart, a book about immigration and immigrants. The stories are divided into two sections, “Departing” and “Returning,” the first featuring a cast of characters in as many stages of adjustment to their new home, and the second showcasing the internal and interpersonal tensions at play when a person comes home. But Makumbi’s decision to reject these particular words allows her project to bridge, in a way, the segregated categories of “migrant” and “expatriate” fiction. The characters in Let’s Tell This Story Properly always have one foot in the River Irwell and the other in Lake Victoria. Beyond labels and genres, the book aims to rectify the flattening of narratives that happens when a story is only told one way.
Makumbi, who taught English in Uganda for many years before moving to England and now teaches writing at Lancaster University, is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Kintu, which won the Kwani? Manuscript prize and was published in Kenya in 2014. Though incredibly popular in Uganda and other parts of Africa, the novel was slow to catch on in the rest of the world. British publishers claimed it was “too African” for their audiences, but in 2016, the Oakland, California-based Transit Books picked it up as one of their first titles. It has since been picked up by Oneworld in the U.K. and paved the way for its author to win the Windham-Campbell, one of the richest prizes in the literary world. Kintu is at first glance a series of disconnected tales—jumping from the Buganda kingdom before colonization to Kampala in the twenty-first century—that reveal themselves to be threads in a complicated web of family history and lore, eventually coalescing into a single epic story. Let’s Tell This Story Properly, on the other hand, resists the reader’s wish to connect the dots. Echoes of one story reverberate through the others, but always arrive distorted. Could Teta, the mixed-race woman at the swanky dinner party in “The Nod,” be the child of the sailor in the “Our Allies the Colonies,” you wonder, until you remember that the baby in question was a boy aptly named Moses. Is the suicide mentioned in passing in “Our Brother, Bwemage” the same man who took his own life when he returned to Uganda to find himself locked out of the house he built? This sort of double take pervades the book, lending it an emblematic narrative confusion. “It couldn’t be, but it might as well be,” Makumbi seems to be saying. There is no single story of migration, even if there are commonalities. The only proper way to tell it is in its multiplicity.
The weaving of strands that was so deft in Kintu, and so effective, is still thankfully in evidence. Here it happens not at the end of the book but in its prologue. The story, “Christmas is Coming,” takes place in the months and days leading up to the holiday, while a twelve-year-old boy spends the time in dread of a threat lingering over his family’s heads, trying to convince his parents to return to Uganda where “God was hands-on.”
He watched and recorded every wicked deed, word, and thought in his black book. Then he sent his angels to stockpile wood in hell to burn you when you died. That’s why grown-ups at home behaved—no messing about. But here in Manchester, where God gave up a long time ago, grown-ups are out of control. Children have no power to keep them in line.
When the family does inevitably gather to “eat Christmas” (“as if it’s served on a plate,” Luzinda derides his mother’s phrasing), a reader returning after having read the rest of the collection will notice some familiar names. Poonah from the airport is there, and we get a glimpse of the troubles that Katula has with her husband in “Malik’s Door.” These names prime readers to notice these resonances one or two hundred pages later, perhaps just subconsciously, perhaps with the pleasant puzzlement of half-recognition.
As a prologue should, “Christmas is Coming” sets both the stage for several of the book’s characters, and the tone for the whole collection, challenging the reader’s misapprehensions of immigration and of Ugandans in Britain. Luzinda’s father is very aware of the racism his son will face at school; what he doesn’t realize is that much of it will come from other Black students, such as his best friend who tells him, “I may not be white, but at least I’m not African,” or the “Caribbean boy [who] beat a white boy for calling him African.” Much is made about stereotypes of African men, as well. When Children’s Services come knocking, he knows they will be quick to assume he is violent or neglectful, while the reality is just the opposite. “Did his father hit his mother?. . . They don’t ask whether his mum hit his dad.” In Luzinda’s world, everything is upside-down; the Christmas tree is a menace “blinking in the dark like a witch.” Even the natural world is backward. The story opens with Luzinda sitting in his window, observing a cat on the street below. “It launches—puff-puff, snarling, yowling—into the bush and a fox yelps and scrums out . . . A whole fox? Chased yelping and scurrying by a cat? So wrong. Like a husband walloped by his wife.”
As the book’s title is Let’s Tell This Story Properly, Makumbi leaves nothing to chance when it comes to the language—or rather languages—in which these stories are told. English and Luganda share space on the page, often within the same sentence: “Eyajj’okola teyebakka,” the bootstrapping Poonah tells her new colleague Nnamuli at the Manchester airport. Those words are set in Roman, not italics, as are their gloss: “Being in Britain is the proverbial prostituting: you know you came to work, why get in bed with knickers on?” This sort of code-switching happens often, and it takes different forms. A few pages earlier, Poonah shows Nnamuli some tough love: “‘Tsk’—Poonah dropped English altogether—‘that’s nothing. Stop acting spoilt. Do you need the money or not?’” Here the Luganda is glossed, understood between the two characters but appearing as English on the page. This way, Makumbi avoids those hallmarks of “world” literature, italics and glossaries. As Aaron Bady noted in his introduction to Kintu, “The main thing to know, simply, is that this novel was written for Ugandans.” Makumbi makes the point herself in the author’s note to Let’s Tell This Story Properly, addressed to a second-person that is at once “you people at home” and the author herself. This is not an exotic tale of otherness, written to show English readers the beauty and strangeness of foreign lands and different cultures. It is “a few unfiltered snapshots of our world.”
Makumbi’s world is local, rooted in the way people speak to each other. Credit must be given to Transit Books for opting to preserve the British English of Makumbi’s prose in the American edition. The book’s original title is Manchester Happened, and the Mancunian dialect is just as essential to the texture of the book as is the Ganda language. Poonah, the only character to feature in two stories (as well as being mentioned in the prologue), is probably the best example of this. In “Something Inside So Strong,” we are told that “Poonah was a success story,” having worked her way up from a factory job to a position as an Airport Security Officer at Manchester Airport, and is working toward a university degree in social work. She has come this far because she expected nothing from either her new country or her homeland, and so has worked hard at adapting to “the English language, how and where it discriminated against its own native speakers. Poonah decided to acquire the Mancunian twang. You don’t do menial jobs and speak posh English—colleagues isolate you, claiming you have airs.” The subtleties of linguistic register are always at play: accents are appraised and judged, parents are chided if their children speak no Luganda, returning expats speak only in English.
Perhaps the book’s best language, on a sentence level, is found in its most surprising story. “Memoirs of a Namaaso” is written in the first person, from the perspective of a young Ugandan who is brought unwillingly to England. This first-person narrator, unlike the other characters in the collection, is no person but, in fact, a dog. “My British name is Stow,” the story begins. “I am sixteen human years old and I was born a pariah dog in Uganda; call me a stray if you are contemptuous. I only became a pet when I arrived in Britain fifteen years ago. I have three or four weeks to live.” Stow is a fiercely independent and proud dog, confused by the posh breeder dogs she encounters in Manchester and slow to adapt to their way of life. Certainly the story functions as an allegory for the ways that people do and don’t adapt to new cultures, but—as with Gulliver’s travels to the Land of the Houyhnhnms, the dogs described in “Memoirs of a Namaaso” espouse ideals of equality and acceptance among themselves (“it was those differences that made all dogs unique and beautiful and wonderful”), yet ignorant to the point of intolerance when it comes to Stow (“you’re so anonymous you don’t even have a breed!”), who finds herself relegated to the level of Yahoos. And, as with Swift’s satire, the fun Makumbi must have had writing in writing this story is indisputable. One passage in particular, where Stow lists the breeds she would choose for a mate, is belly-achingly hilarious: “Alaskan malamute. Dishy but rather haughty. So into themselves, don’t you think? Still, they would get an invite.” And, as any shrewdly-turned satire should, this canine perspective opens her writing up to new possibilities, and adds a striking inventiveness to Makumbi’s language . Recounting her last days in Uganda, Stow says, “I decided to go home and yawn the day away in my familiar.” As she leaves that home forever she describes “the tugging sensation just before a shooting speed as the plane launches itself, delirious,” and we are asked, “Did you know oceans smell large and heady?”
Smell plays an important part of the expatriate experience, as does language, but maybe the key sense in Let’s Tell This Story Properly is vision. From the clothes people wear when they arrive, to the way they present themselves when they return, to the knowing glances they exchange in public, the characters’ gazes speak volumes, and nowhere more so than in the story “The Nod”:
When I arrived at the party the guests were so natural around me I forgot myself because I didn’t see myself in their eyes. I was just another person. It’s true we see ourselves in the eyes that look at us. I didn’t realize this until I came to Britain. When they look at you, people’s eyes are all mirrors. The problem is you’re always looking at yourself.
This reflexive gaze harks back to Du Bois or Fanon, the double consciousness of a stranger in a strange land, as recognizable to a Ugandan in Manchester as a Martinican in Paris. But it becomes more complicated when the character Lucky realizes that she’s not the only Black woman at the party. She fails to give Teta “the nod” of recognition that etiquette dictates, and the rest of their interaction is a nightmare of self-conscious face saving. “What I did not realize was that she was watching. She saw every wave of my frantic thoughts in my eyes as I tried to place her.” Lucky is not just watching herself being watched, but watching how Teta watches her watching her.
The stakes are highest in the last—and maybe the best—story in the collection. “Love Made in Manchester” features Poonah again, six years later. Her friend Kayla from the airport, who is white and married to a Ugandan man, invites her to come with her to Uganda for the first time. Kayla’s son Masaaba, a thirteen-year-old born and raised in Britain, has decided to have a traditional circumcision, imbalu, and has attracted international attention as a result. He’s raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the “dare,” and the BBC sends a film crew along with the family to document the preparations and the ceremony. In Uganda, it becomes a national affair with government ministers getting involved and an entire city gathering to partake in the festivities and witness the imbalu. In a situation like this, all of the tensions at play in other parts of the book come to a head, as perception comes to define reality for everyone involved. They hire an agent for the son to make sure he comes off well in the world’s eyes. Kayla is worried about the image she presents as a white woman in Uganda, both an outsider and an insider. Poonah is wary of the gaze of Kayla’s in-laws, and of the film crew: “They edit their programmes to show this fragile white woman who married an African now traumatised by his barbaric culture. Can you imagine the backlash online when Africans see it?” Everyone is on edge, anticipating how they will be seen, by others and by themselves. The family agrees that Masaaba will donate all of the money from the dare, because the West will look unfavorably on him—and on his mother—if he keeps it.
Maybe more than the title story, “Love Made in Manchester” is an example of the “danger of the single story,” to borrow a phrase from the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In her now-famous TED talk, she says, “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” In news coverage, in popular fiction, Africa is only one thing. Uganda is only poverty, homophobia, and the despotism of Idi Amin. Migrants are only desperate refugees, and the stream of migration only flows in one direction. Makumbi eschews the stereotypes and the flat narratives of who she is and who her people are. “England is green, but this place is out of this world,” Massaaba says in one of his BBC interviews.
The soil is red; never seen anything like it … I grew up with images of a barren Africa like sheer poverty, you know, in those humiliating charity organisation ads of skeletal children drinking dirty water cows are pooing in and people are washing in at the same time, or fat mothers holding starving children, that made you think what is wrong with these people? Until you realise the nature of editing. I mean there is poverty, obviously, but I’ve seen poverty in New York.
A single story is never the whole story. The only proper way to tell it is as multiple narratives, lives that interweave and tie together, but are ultimately unique and independent. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi grants us this as a corrective, a bright and rich collection that offers a glimpse into the expat community without presuming to show the whole picture.
Noah M. Mintz is a reader, translator, teacher, and former bookseller. His words can be found in Two Lines and on the BTBA blog, as well as on Twitter. A PhD candidate in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia, he lives in Brooklyn by way of Chicago and San Francisco.